T-SQL Tuesday #57 – SQL Family and Community

Look at that, it is once again that time of the month that has come to be known as TSQL Tuesday. TSQL Tuesday is a recurring blog party that occurs on the second Tuesday (most generally) of the month. This event was the brainchild of Adam Machanic (Blog | Twitter).

Anybody who desires to participate in this blog party is welcome to join. Coincidentally, that open invitation is at the base of this months topic – Family and Community. The invitation, issued by Jeffrey Verheul (blog | twitter), for this month said the following.

This month I would like to give everyone the opportunity to write about SQL Family. The first time I heard of SQL Family, was on Twitter where someone mentioned this. At first I didn’t know what to think about this. I wasn’t really active in the community, and I thought it was a little weird. They were just people you meet on the internet, and might meet in person at a conference some day. But I couldn’t be more wrong about that!

Once you start visiting events, forums, or any other involvement with the community, you’ll see I was totally wrong. I want to hear those stories. How do you feel about SQL Family? Did they help you, or did you help someone in the SQL Family? I would love to hear the stories of support, how it helped you grow and evolve, or how you would explain SQL Family to your friends and family (which I find hard). Just write about whatever topic you want, as long as it’s related to SQL Family or community.

What is it?

We have all likely seen SQL Family thrown about here and there. But what exactly is this notion we hear about so often?

I think we have a good idea about what family might be. I think we might even have a good idea of what a friend is. Lastly, I might propose that we know what a community is. When we talk of this thing called SQL Family, I like to think that it is a combination of family, friends and community.

These are people that can come together and talk about various different things that span far beyond SQL Server. We may only see each other at events every now and then. Those events can be anything from a User Group meeting to a large conference or even at a road race (5k, half marathon, marathon).

These are the people that are willing to help where help is needed or wanted. That help can be anything ranging from well wishes and prayers, to teaching about SQL Server, to lending a vehicle, or anything along that spectrum.

I have seen this community go out of their way to help provide a lift to a hotel or to the airport. These people will help with lodging in various circumstances when/if they can. These are the people that have been known to make visits to hospitals to give well wishes for other people in the community.

Isn’t that what friends / family really boils down to? People that can talk to each other on an array of topics? People that go out of their way to help? Think about it for a minute or three.

Auto-generated statistics names can seem like they are entirely random, but there is a method to the madness. With a little effort and a bit of TSQL trickery, we can decode those names and reveal what the names really mean.

The default collation for SQL Server is a pretty bad idea. Sure, it works but so does SQL Server 7. When you have the opportunity to update to more current technologies, it is a good idea. Sometimes though, that upgrade can come with some pain. This article shows how to alleviate one such pain point by fixing problems related to collation conflicts and XE.

This article has just shared multiple tools to help you become more acquainted with the Query Store! This acquaintance is coming via an extremely powerful tool called Extended Events. Through the use of these two sessions and two additional scripts, this article demonstrates how to become more familiar with the internals for QDS.

The ability to quickly and easily trace a query is important to database professionals. This script provides one useful alternative to trace a specific spid similar to the method of using the context menu to create the trace within SSMS and Profiler.

This article takes us to the edge with a couple of CRM related errors after changing the service account to a more secure Managed Service Account. Despite the CRM reports working properly within Report Manager (via SSRS), the reports would fail in CRM.

Working with Extended Events will help you become a better DBA. Working with PoSh can also help you in many various tasks to become a better DBA. Combine the two and you just might have a super weapon.